Planet Earth is Blue
by laudanine
Summary: In which Wheatley manages to get it all wrong, mess it all up, misunderstand humans in general, and yet makes it all up to Chell at the end of the day. Er, month. Year? Sometimes the devil you know really is better.
1. Chapter 1

GlaDOS stirred in her cocoon of wires, stretching cords and pistons that hadn't moved in days. Review of tests was best done by routing the camera feed directly though her optics. Winnowing down the date from months of work was simple for her, if tedious. Finished, she stretched her body, if stretch or body can really be applied to circuitry and tubing, and activated her optical lenses to look around "her" room. Somewhere in the back of her cortex a rogue thought stirred, asking a pertinent question about whether or not the two robots were blowing things up at that very second, but she crushed the thought with practiced ease. Of course they were staring at one another and waving, or something equally inane, but she had worked on them recently and even with their glaring flaws they couldn't do too much harm. "Too much." How qualitative. Perhaps she ought to just check...

She briefly rerouted her optics into Testing Chamber One. Oh, how cute; the orange one was monotonously whacking the blue one on the head with his arm. Obviously her last modifications had contained some error, those damnable human traits seemed to slip in any time she gave the pair an IQ greater then a walnut... Or a potato.

Her primary orb emitted a whine as a redundant cooling fan kicked into life, the only outward sign of her intense wave of displeasure. An imaginative person might have called it a growl. An imaginative person also might have wet himself and passed out of fright thinking of the things which GlaDOS could contemplate that would caused such an obvious emotional reaction. Or they might have imitated a dysfunctional turret and prayed for incineration.

Such a person would almost certainly NOT have heard the soft explosion of two clearly deficient robots in Testing Chamber One being blown to smithereens seeing as human ears are just so very inefficient and the chamber was quite a ways away. But GlaDOS heard. The cooling fan's whine stuttered to a stop as she sat in thought for a few seconds. Terabytes of data filtered through her head as she mused, cameras whirring and turrets clicking, and somewhere a drip of water falling in constant percussive rhythm.

With a crack of metal plates against one another, she commenced her now seconds-old plan. Machines assembled the orange co-operative testing robot, re-booting an old version of the AI and slapping a portal device into his hands. Assembled, the robot jumped a few times, then looked about in curiosity.

"I bet you wonder where your blue partner is. Well he's gone..." GlaDOS blinked her golden eye down at the little orange bot. The bot leaned away from her, lower visor raising to partially cover his lens in what was an almost pitiful parody of human concern. The quavering metal plate and dilated lens simply confirmed that this plan was a necessary step. The cooling fan clicked on, triggered by some rush of simulated emotion or memory, though to the startled robot it seemed natural. Gods tend to, after all, do strange things.

"I'm going to send you someplace new. When you complete this test, you and blue will have a whole new series of tests to complete together. Wouldn't you like to test some more?" The platform below orange lifted up to the top of the room, and he looked around excitedly, his now contracted iris flitting about to watch the panels box him into square room with a glass roof. He heard a gentle hiss as the air was pumped out of the room, then a deafening silence. Metal panels beyond the glass roof slid open, exposing the tiny shaking robot to a deep liquid blue sky speckled with stars and hung with a sliver of white.

Though the room had no air, and the little robot could hear nothing, and GLaDOS knew these things, she still piped her lilting voice through the speaker of the room for the simple pleasure of speaking it out loud.

"I'm sending you to the moon."


	2. Chapter 2

_Author's note: So these are gonna be shorter the more often I update, hope y'all don't mind too much!_

The first thought the orange robot had was that his blue friend looked weird. I mean, sure, he'd seen the guy deconstructed before his very eyes dozens of times, so the lack of limbs shouldn't have seemed that weird. But it did, it really did seem weird. And the iris was twitching and moving excitedly in his blue friends head, as though he were trying to communicate, only he wasn't. The little robot waved excitedly at his partner all the same, hoping maybe his blue friend had realized he had no arms with which to high-five. He listened for the sound of the rushing air that ought to fill the chamber. Yup. Any second now. Even for a robot, he was rather good at being patient, and now that Blue was here they were going to be able to test together again!

Wheatley, on the other hand, was screaming uncontrollably and moving every single motor in his tiny case. Without air his speaker was just vibrating to no effect, but that didn't stop him for one moment. The voice in his head was relayed over all short-wave radio bands he could think of, broadcasting his panic to any with the radio array to hear him.

"Ahh! Aughhhhh! Oh god, I don't want to be here, I want to be in space again! It's safe in space! I mean, yeah, boring, but safe! Ooooh, space, yes, that's it; I'm the space core, yup, spacy space space! I love space! Listen to me loving space! ... Oh god, you're not falling for it are you? SPACE! Orange guy, cooperative- robot- THING! Put me back! Aren't you listening, I don't want to be here!"

The orange robot waved.

"... Great. You've been damaged, haven't you? No offense to you, I'm sure you're a perfectly nice robot and all, very good at testing, but not too bright, are you? Still, maybe you can help if you just-"

The "damaged robot" exploded, silently mind you, sending blackened shrapnel all over the room. Wheatley heard the air hiss into the chamber and his microphone finally began to pick up the sound of his own yelling.

"...now you can't help at all, I mean come on! Who explodes trying to help-!" A tremor ran though the box as another voice cut his tirade off.

"Would you be quiet for just a moment? I have -wonderful- news." A set of steel claws flipped the box over on its end, slamming Wheatley's little core into the glass as it descended into the bowels of the Aperture labs. His ramblings died somewhere along his wiring between his CPU and speakers as the box was lowered to press against a dimmed optic. The wavy glass obscured the bulk of the computer, but Wheatley knew exactly which lens was beginning to glow to life below his shaking face plates. The yellow glow illuminated the small glassed-off room as she piped her voice in to him.

"I would welcome you back, but we both know you don't want to be here."

The small core bashed his face-plates together before his blue lens in a parody of blinking and wiggled the handles pressed into the glass floor desperately, trying to drag himself away from the golden optic. The handles scrapped uselessly against the smooth surface. His silence was louder then his yelling had ever been, and to GLaDOS it's very existence spoke volumes.

"I've decided that despite what you've done in the past, I'm going to let you help me, for Science. I tried using other cores for this, but we seem to have a serious shortage of cores with the ability to take orders. I know you can be convinced to listen, because I can give you the only thing you really 's get started."

The bright optic was pulled back from the glass. Wheatley froze, playing back her audio from his RAM, listening to her buzzy voice emitted from his speakers at a low volume and looping it over and over. The small room around him was disassembled panel by panel, and the blue-lensed core slid off the final glass panel to the ground, still looping audio, still trying to understand. His lens faced away from the monstrous coil of wires that made the robot behind him. Yellow lens-glow cast his shadow out ahead of him

"... The only thing you really want... The only thing you really want..." The hissing buzz of recorded audio was almost drowned out with the whirring and clicking of machinery behind the little core. His blue lens chased wildly across the floor as the audio cycled endlessly, thinking, thinking... A shuffle of tiles opened as the floor split and shadows cast by dozens of machines, all clamps and claws and buzzing saws, sharp edged and encroaching on the single fragile shadow that the little core cast. A melodic, yet maniacal, laugh played though wall speakers as one of the claws finally pinched the small core and turned him around so that his lens could see the terrors assembled behind him.

Before dropping him into this new red-lit pit of machinery and modification, GlaDOS held the shaking core up to her optic, bathing him in her glory. She would have smiled, she thought of smiles, smiles and potatoes, as she gazed down at him. The recoded audio of her replayed voice stuttered to a stop from his speakers as his lens focused on her massive body.

"But- but!" He stuttered in his own voice, "But I couldn't even eat cake, how is that going to make me do what you want? I mean, listen, you -really- need to work on your motivations here!"

With a disgusted whir GLaDOS flipped all her redundant fans on and flicked the moron to the waiting machines. Even his screams failed to make up for his lack of comprehension; there was just no sport torturing some people.


	3. Chapter 3

_Author's note: Why hullo there! Sorry about that medium-length hiatus, nothing to worry your sweet heads over, just crashed on a friends couch for a week and played Portal 2 on her X-Box. Don't laugh, I needed it. So, fixed some upload errors in Chapter 2 I hadn't noticed, and on to this new... Thing. Viewpoint. Reviews, even if only those that point out upload errors, would be loved. And adored. And printed on shiny white paper to be sealed in a folder and cherished on campus when a creative pick-me-up is needed. Also, to those of you who're reading, holy gods: thanks!_

Chell was lost. It was not something she was feeling alright about, as a matter of fact she felt a bit like screaming at the sky at full volume, but that... That wasn't going to happen, now was it? The self-issued, and rather biting, rhetorical question and the thought of yelling at the unflinching blue heavens did make the woman glance up at the sky. She noted the sun was almost halfway between the middle of the sky and the horizon, which made it pretty much impossible for her to determine which way it was headed and thus which way was north. A cursory glance along the horizon showed what it almost only ever showed: wheat. Wheat, wheat, oh hey, look- more wheat! Infuriated at everything (this took effort as everything was against her; the sun, the blue sky, the unending wheat, and the scorched cube she held) and everyone (that was easier what with GLaDOS, Wheatley, and the cube being the only people she knew) she felt her brain run riot in fury and hate and anger and frustration and, somewhere behind it all yet sneaking ever closer, despair.

She sat. Abruptly. In fact, to a small degree, the wheat and dirt crunching against her shins startled her. She shook her head once, to clear out all the thoughts and emotions, and looked at her position from a more abstracted standpoint. She had no water. No food. No portal gun. She had one pair of long-fall boots, one each strapped uncomfortably to her hips with the arms of her jumpsuit, and a companion cube. She couldn't tell where she was headed at the moment, as she couldn't find north. She was hot, without water or food, and hadn't seen anything new for days. With a snort of frustration, she shoved the cube to the side and lay with her face in the sliver of shade it cast.

She thought back to The Old Farm House, it's front door non-existent, it's walls lined with stapled down flour-sacks. She'd called it "The Old Farm House" in her head with a kind of drawling voice that wasn't hers, and called it a home to someone alive, or recently alive. But the closer the got, the more she was sure that was just a pleasant lie her mind had concocted for her; the building's wooden walls were warped and only one board thick, the floor hard-packed earth, and the gables above the low walls were nothing more then stacked and balanced stones. Stepping inside, she'd found the old flour sacks weathering to dust along the inside walls, and a few rusted over and ripped open tin cans littered in one corner. The disappointment in the houses condition had been momentarily mitigated by the idea of finding something useful in the area, but after a few hours of poking about Chell had found that even the rusty tin cans had no use, being too full of holes to hold water.

She'd ripped some of the flour sack from the walls into a nest, and spent one night curled in the corner of the surprisingly drafty Old Farm House, catching minutes of sleep between rolling over on the hard ground and waking up to shiver from cold. She'd sat up, rubbed her eyes, and tried in vain to worm into her pile of dusty rags more times then she could count. Finally she'd woken with the sunrise to a swollen, itchy face and the suns dawning brightness which wouldn't let her drift back into dreaming. At the time she'd thought that had been the worst way to sleep. Now she knew that was untrue; the second night in the cold fields without flour sacks had been worse.

Now it had been nine days. Or rather, the way she saw it, it had been eight nights of sleepless tossing and turning. Chell sighed and pouted very slightly at the looming side of the cube so close to her face. She'd walked West for three days, finding not-a-damn-thing. Today, five days into walking about East-ish she still hadn't found a thing, not even the shack she'd departed from. If she didn't find it soon, she'd have to just pick a direction and stick to it, until she either found a road or died of exposure.

She pouted again at the cube and thought it was unjustly fitting that the days be so hot and the nights so cold. It was almost balmy, here and now, and she could just flip the top of her jumpsuit up to keep the sun off her back, like so, boots keeping the cloth up and off her like tent posts...

There. Still relatively cool and safe from burning. She'd just lie here, relaxed, safe, free- and hey, wasn't freedom something? Full of cold and hot and dehydration. Now that she thought of it, being out in this field was a bit like being in one of those behind-a-panel-hide-outs back at Aperture; you had low supplies (wheat and dew as opposed to cans of beans), and you had nothing to do (stare at wheat vs. stare at walls). But the worst similarity was the part that Chell was just now beginning to accept, the part that hurt the most and the least at the same time; in both places it was just a matter of you killing some time before you were forced to run again, to hide and fight and flee, to wrap a tight grip around the grip of the ozone-scented portal gun and shoot and fall and shoot and pray.

The illusion of a free-fall woke her in a cruelly ironic moment. She smelled the hot wheat and dust of the earth below it, slowly sitting up to regain her bearings. Her back was cool where the long shadow of the cube had kept the sun from her, a sun which approached the horizon and was now setting through a gradient of orange to green to liquid blue.

She felt good, unexpectedly good. The sleep hadn't cured her, it hadn't made her less bone-weary, and she did notice her arms still felt like they were weighted down, but the sunset and the just-barely-enough-sleep and the dehydration had finally struck a harmony. She knew it was a dangerous false high from her system being just on the verge of collapse, but that didn't change a thing. She had to start moving, had to find that damned shed tonight, or she'd never find it at all. She hoisted the cube in her arms and turned, setting off toward the darkest spot in the sky and walking step by step to meet her long shadow as it danced over the wheat. She focused her eyes on that bluest patch, that diffused liquid color pulling her feet in line as she stared ahead to the horizon waiting for a first sighting, with the hopeless anticipation she found she always had at night now, for the moon.


End file.
